Six-Day War: 23rd Anniversary Report
By Aïssata Diallo 

This report refers to a sad date for the whole of the Democratic Republic of Congo. On June 5th, 2000, 23 years ago, the Democratic Republic of Congo faced a war that lasted six days from 5 to 10 June 2000 in the city of Kisangani.

Kisangani was the epicentre of an outbreak of violence by the Ugandan and Rwandan armies in support of rival local factions for the management of territories. Kisangani, the martyred city with multiple desires, could not escape the ravages of a war whose after-effects remain.

Located in the centre of the Congo Basin, the city of Kisangani is a river port at the confluence of the Lindi, Tshopo and Congo rivers. Given this strategic position, the authorities had elevated the city to the rank of regional capital, making it a major economic development pole for the country. However, this coveted regional capital has been the object of fighting between militias since the 1990s, which has severely affected the regional economy as well as the living conditions of the local civilian population, leaving the DRC government powerless. 

It was on Monday, June 5th, 2000, that this war broke out. It was a high-intensity war with fighting that had its epicentre in the centre of Kisangani. This abrupt war was marked by the violation of fundamental principles of international law. Indeed, the intervention of Rwanda and Uganda on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo by the regular Rwandan military forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) in support of local factions represented an immediate violation of the territorial integrity of Congo and contributed to the intensification of the violence of the fighting.

The occupation of Kisangani by these two foreign countries in support of local factions was strategic and totally self-serving. Their presence in the resource-rich North-East was aimed at controlling the region's mineral wealth. This foreign interference fuelled the second Congo war by destabilising local institutions and accentuating the interests of the two neighbouring states, which took advantage of the situation to institutionalise a stranglehold by these nations on the Congo's natural resources. A six-day war in which direct confrontations and violence were at their peak. This outburst of violence by the regular Rwandan and Ugandan forces to establish a monopoly on the mining management of the territory resulted in numerous war victims, including a significant number of deaths in six days, not to mention the destruction of local homes and institutions. The main victims of this conflict were civilians.

Apart from the violation of the right of states to preserve the territorial integrity of their countries, the Six-Day War resulted in a total absence of care for the civilian population, who were left to their own devices in the chaos of a sudden and unexpected war. The testimonies and investigations relate that there was an illegal occupation of civilian habitations and the conscious use of heavy weapons in urban areas, adding to the toll of human and material losses.

The 10th of June 2000 marked the end of this disastrous war that lasted six days. The toll was heavy, more than a thousand dead and more than five hundred wounded in the bowels of a ravaged city that had become a martyr.

At the international level, the UN Council adopted resolution 13041 on June 16th 2000, which condemned the Ugandan and Rwandan governments to provide reparations for the human and material losses. This condemnation will also open the door to a series of investigations for war crimes.

The United Nations Mapping Exercise report of August 2010 on the most alarming human rights violations between March 1993 and June 2003 on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo reported "indiscriminate attacks with heavy weapons in densely populated areas". However, as Rwanda does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the Court has not been able to pronounce on the role played by the Rwandan capital Kigali. Nevertheless, on December 19th, 2005, Uganda, which recognises this decision-making authority, was condemned by this same body for the damage caused to the Congo "by the armed struggle and the pillaging of natural resources". It should be noted that beyond the Six-Day War, it is also the interference, occupation, and active and official support to local militias since 1998 that led to the condemnation of Uganda. The damage done by Uganda was the subject of reparations which were estimated by the International Court of Justice on February 9th, 2022, 22 years later, at the sum of 325 million dollars. This amount was considered insufficient and disappointing for the victims of Kisangani who lost everything during those six days. The Democratic Republic of Congo had expressly requested the sum of 11 billion dollars from Uganda as compensation.

Where are we today?

Two decades after the events, the main perpetrators of war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo have still not been prosecuted. The aftermath of the Six-Day War was marked by the establishment of a sustainable economy for the various criminal networks that plagued the region. This criminalisation of the regional economy to the benefit of trafficking has rooted the region in a security instability to which Kinshasa is struggling to respond.

It is important to remember that under international public law, the damage suffered by private individuals must be compensated by the State of which they are a national. The compensation of victims is therefore the responsibility of the Congolese state. The Congolese government had undertaken to compensate the victims of the conflict. A first payment of more than one million dollars was released in 2020, but the victims' associations point to the absence of payment of the second part, and alert public opinion to the precarious  living conditions of the victims. A first payment from Uganda of nearly $65 million was made in September 2022, but the victims have not yet been able to benefit from it. A deep resentment of abandonment has fuelled the north-eastern region and more particularly the city of Kisangani. Thus, a “mistrust in the proper management of funds” has developed, a pervasive feeling among the local population today. The regional failure of government institutions, in which perverse corruption has become the norm, only increases the sense of injustice felt by the people. Dismas Kitenge, President of the Lotus Group based in Kisangani, calls on the authorities "not to repeat the mistakes of the past, marked by corruption".

On this tragic twenty-third anniversary, the situation is alarming. Victims whose voices are struggling to be heard, forgotten by a government that is supposed to protect them, and numerous requests from victims to the Congolese state remain unanswered. Internationally, the failure to prosecute the Rwandan government for its active involvement in the Six-Day War is increasing the sense of injustice taking hold in the region and disrupting the assumption of regional stability. Moreover, the resumption of arms by the rebel movement of the March 23 Movement (M23) in 2021, a movement officially created to protect the Rwandan Tutsi ethnic group in Congo, shows the consequences of the impunity of the Rwandan government instrumentalising the rebellion. In fact, the links between the M23 and Rwanda, which have been confirmed by both Kinshasa and the UN, maintain national and regional instability and have recently given rise to firm positions on the international scene by the United States and France. For Erik Nyindu, Director of Communications of the DR Congo Presidency, “it is Kigali that holds the key to ending hostilities in the DRC”. However, the belated international position without coercive means against the Rwandan government contributes to the continuing conflicts in the east of the country.

On 21 April, a sit-in gathering victims from Kisangani to Kinshasa was violently dispersed by the police. This method was deemed "degrading" by the spokesperson for the DRC's human rights NGOs. Despite the release of part of the funds and the execution of the  court decision in Uganda, the victims of Kisangani are now faced with the indifference of their own government, which does not seem to be ready to compensate the unfortunate victims.

delonu-pointe-la-responsabilite-du-rwanda-dans-les-massacres-du-m23, 22 décembre 2022

Made up of eighteen percent of the world’s tropical forests, 10,000 plant species and 400 mammal species, the Congo Basin in Central Africa provides household food security to over 75 million people across 150 ethnic groups, courtesy of its 10,000 plant species and 400 mammal species, and is the second largest contiguous tropical rainforest. Something we all know very well, however, is the urgency of the climate crisis. We, members of Friends of the Congo, will point you who are interested in doing something to combat the climate crisis in the direction of the Congo Basin. Our objective is not to convince any environmental justice organization to include the Congo Basin in their organizing strategies, but to simply have them look into the Congo Basin, because once they look into it, they will see its importance and work it into their organizing strategies themselves.

In 2017, Congolese and British scientists discovered a peatland in the central Congo Basin covering an area of over 145,000 square kilometers (>56,000 square miles) – an area the size of England. A peatland consists primarily of peat – soil composed of the buildup of partially decomposed organic matter over thousands of years. Why is this important? Carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration is the process by which carbon dioxide is captured and stored (United States Geological Survey). Peat sequesters carbon more efficiently than any other vegetation type in the world combined (International Union for Conservation of Nature), with peatlands storing twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests and damaged peatlands accounting for five percent of global anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. It is estimated that the peat located in the Congo Basin in what is known as the Cuvette Centrale (Central Basin) stores over 30 billion metric tons of carbon. To put into perspective how significant this is, 30 billion metric tons of carbon is equivalent to the amount the United States emits from burning fossil fuels over a twenty-year span, and to the amount the entire world emits over three years. Perhaps more amazingly, peatlands in the Congo Basin hold as much carbon as all of its trees put together, despite only covering four percent of the entire rainforest. It is for this reason that climate scientists stress the protection of the Congo Basin. It is the only rainforest on the planet that sequesters more carbon than it releases. Africans outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or Republic of Congo are all too aware of its importance. During the Season of Creation 2021, the Ecclesial Network for the Congo River Basin (REBAC) – a Catholic coalition consisting of the DRC, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon – called the Congo Basin “the second lung of the Earth” (Union of Catholic Asian News 2021). However, external and internal forces threaten to transform an image as positive as a lung of the Earth to something as menacingly sounding as a “carbon bomb.”

Damian Carrington and Matthew Taylor of The Guardian defined a carbon bomb as “a project capable of pumping at least 1 billion tons of CO₂ emissions over [its] lifetime.” Usually, these are fossil fuel projects. In the case of the Congo Basin, the peat is continually disrupted by international timber firms who clearcut trees illegally. In fact, as of 2011, at least 87% of the logging in the Congo was illegal, per Chatham House. Only eight percent of the central Congo peat carbon is located in nationally protected areas. Ninety-two percent is vulnerable to future land exploitation, per CongoPeat.

The Global North has very deceptively attempted to fearmonger over the fact that the Congo has aspirations of increasing its oil production from 25,000 barrels per day to 1 million. They claim that doing so would destroy the Congo Basin rainforests. While it is true that oil expansion poses a serious threat, it cannot be ignored that the biggest threat to this point has been the supply chain demands of foreign companies, who buy Congolese wood at a cheap price to fashion it into finished goods and sell it back to the Congo at an exorbitant price.

There are multiple bad faith actors at play here. The Rwandan government under Paul Kagame (Al Jazeera 2022) and the Ugandan government under Yoweri Museveni (Africa Intelligence 2022) are guilty of instrumentalizing a proxy rebel militia known as the March 23 Movement, or M23, to destabilize Eastern Congo and exploiting its timber and mineral wealth. The Congo Basin rainforests are at stake here, notably Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (TRT World 2023). As a consequence of M23’s activities, hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been displaced from their ancestral lands. Illegal logging has become rampant, and it is estimated that by 2030, thirty percent of the rainforest will have disappeared. If this pace continues, it could mean the destruction of all primary forests by 2100 (National Geographic 2021).

A December 2021 article by The Washington Post stated that the Democratic Republic of the Congo “faces pressure to preserve its peatlands and the vast stores of carbon they hold, or develop them for profit, releasing an enormous carbon bomb into the atmosphere.” Friends of the Congo cannot stress enough that the issue of the Congo Basin is not solely a Congolese issue. It is not a Central African or an African issue. It is an issue of humanity. It is an issue of the world and all who inhabit it. As such, it cannot be solved without international cooperation – true, sincere international cooperation. No longer can false promises be tolerated, such as that which was made at COP26 by the United States, European Commission on behalf of the European Union, United Kingdom, and Bezos Earth Fund, among others, to imburse $1.5 billion between 2021 and 2025 to protect the Congo Basin. No longer can neocolonialism be tolerated. Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army received training from U.S. Green Berets in the late 1990s. In turn, Kagame’s military trained rebels in the DRC, then known as Zaire, in 1998 (The Washington Post 1998). Kagame today is recognized in the West as someone whom African nations should look up to as a model of modernization, his crimes against his fellow Africans ignored. When attempts are made to hold him and other neocolonial agents accountable, the United States runs diplomatic interference to protect them. Case in point; when the United Nations learned that elements of the Rwandan military committed war crimes constituting crimes against humanity in June of 1998, the United States, in spite of the UN report and other indications of human rights abuse, collaborated with Rwandan military units in a Joint Combined Exchange Training in July (The Washington Post 1998). Per The Washington Post article “Africans Use Training in Unexpected Ways,” “U.S. officials defend[ed] the collaboration by arguing that it is wiser to engage with Rwanda to help it develop a human rights culture than to step aside and risk a new descent of the country into chaos.” Almost twenty-five years later, it is apparent that human rights is the U.S. and the West’s buzzword for imperialism, which Kwame Nkrumah told us neocolonialism is the last stage of imperialism.

The Global North must make restitution to the Global South for colonialism; otherwise, how easily can the Congo Basin, Amazon Rainforest, and Indonesian rainforests among others see a restoration of their biodiversity? Moreover, how else will forest communities get their just due? It was moving reading chief Joseph Bonkile Engobo, a.k.a. Papa Joseph, say that if his forest community of Lokolama was not paid for their role in protecting the peatlands, they would “destroy them so everyone will die” (The New York Times 2022).  No longer can extractivism be tolerated as it is currently tolerated in the artisanal mining of cobalt and coltan in the Congo by private industry. It can no longer be tolerated as it is currently tolerated in the harvesting of palm oil by private industry at the expense of the local population, who have been exposed to toxic waste generated by Plantations et Huileries du Congo (PHC). Global North hegemony must be dismantled to preserve lives, livelihoods, and the planet. As we’ve demonstrated, in our unequal current world order, things such as a green transition and vegan food products which seem positive on the surface are made into points of extraction. There isn’t a state in the USA that can become fully electric sans the Congo. 

The most important people, whose voices must be heard and taken seriously, are the indigenous people living on the land in the Congo Basin. Members of the Congolese intelligentsia increasingly have wisened up to the fact that radio is the most effective means of organizing Congo Basin residents, who already mobilize against the destruction and seizing of their ancestral lands but who lack ready means of coordinating organized resistance or learning new developments sans access to electricity, Internet, and telecommunications. The Center for International Forestry Research[1] [2] [3]  (CIFOR) and its subsidiary Climate Change and Forests in the Congo Basin (COBAM) created a radio program called “Following Changing Seasons.” It is set in a debate format and is broadcast monthly by Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV), Cameroon’s national radio station. COBAM itself encompasses Cameroon, DRC, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. Its objective is to provide local communities with the information necessary to implement projects that will guarantee reduction of carbon emissions in forest areas. Perhaps the most vital point of this radio project and others like it is that they provide a platform for frontline community members and forest defenders that they otherwise would not have. A Cameroonian radio journalist said the following about the CIFORCOBAM radio program:

            “Since we started rebroadcasting the COBAM radio programme, people – particularly 
              farmers – have been coming to our studio for more information on how to deal with
             unpredictable seasons and have better harvests.”

The people of the Congo Basin rainforests are fighting everyday for their lives and livelihoods. Their coalescing into an organized movement will ensure victory and bring about a lasting change.   

For the perspectives of the Indigenous people who are asking what they will get in return for protecting one of the world’s most important ecosystems, visit www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peatlands-congo-climate-change.html: “What Do The Protectors of Congo’s Peatlands Get In Return?”

For more on the Congo Basin, visit www.congopeat.net. This website is a godsend, using models to simulate future development of peatland ecosystems in the Congo Basin.

Listen to Maurice Carney, co-founder and Executive Director of Friends of the Congo, on this issue on A Rude Awakening, at 94.1 KPFA or at Apple Podcasts.

Works Cited

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 ADF. 2021. “Protecting Earth’s ‘Second Lung.’” Africa Defense Forum. October 15, 2021. https://adf-magazine.com/2021/10/protecting-earths-second-lung/.

 “Africa Intelligence: Exclusive News on Africa.” n.d. Africa Intelligence. Accessed January 13, 2023. https://www.africaintelligence.com/central-africa/2022/12/14/report-by-un-experts-reveals-kampala-s-role-in-m23-s-advances.

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 Bociaga, Robert. “How the M23 Advance Threatens DR Congo’s Endangered Gorilla Population.” n.d. How the M23 Advance Threatens DR Congo’s Endangered Gorilla Population. Accessed January 20, 2023. https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-the-m23-advance-threatens-dr-congo-s-endangered-gorilla-population-64154.

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 Cannon, John. “The ‘Idea’: Uncovering the Peatlands of the Congo Basin.” 2021. Mongabay Environmental News. December 2, 2021. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/the-idea-uncovering-the-peatlands-of-the-congo-basin/.

 Carrington, Damian, and Matthew Taylor. 2022. “Revealed: The ‘Carbon Bombs’ Set to Trigger Catastrophic Climate Breakdown.” The Guardian. May 11, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/may/11/fossil-fuel-carbon-bombs-climate-breakdown-oil-gas.

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